Abstract:
Urban ecology is a rapidly growing research field that has to keep pace with the pressing need to tackle the sustainability crisis. As an inherently multi-disciplinary field with close ties to practitioners and administrators, research synthesis and knowledge transfer between those different stakeholders is crucial. Knowledge maps can enhance knowledge transfer and provide orientation to researchers as well as practitioners. A promising option for developing such knowledge maps is to create hypothesis networks, which structure existing hypotheses and aggregate them according to topics and research aims. Combining expert knowledge with information from the literature, we here identify 62 research hypotheses used in urban ecology and link them in such a network. Our network clusters hypotheses into four distinct themes: (i) Urban species traits & evolution, (ii) Urban biotic communities, (iii) Urban habitats and (iv) Urban ecosystems. We discuss the potentials and limitations of this approach. All information is openly provided as part of an extendable Wikidata project, and we invite researchers, practitioners and others interested in urban ecology to contribute additional hypotheses, as well as comment and add to the existing ones. The hypothesis network and Wikidata project form a first step towards a knowledge base for urban ecology, which can be expanded and curated to benefit both practitioners and researchers.
摘要:
城市生态学是一个快速增长的研究领域,必须跟上解决可持续发展危机的迫切需要。作为一个固有的多学科领域,与从业者和管理者有着密切的联系,这些不同利益相关者之间的研究综合和知识转移至关重要。知识地图可以增强知识转移,并为研究人员和从业人员提供指导。开发这种知识地图的一个有希望的选择是创建假设网络,根据主题和研究目的构建现有假设并将其汇总。将专家知识与文献信息相结合,我们在这里确定了62个研究假设用于城市生态学,并将它们链接在这样的网络中。我们的网络将假设分为四个不同的主题:(I)城市物种特征和进化,(二)城市生物群落,(三)城市生境和(四)城市生态系统。我们讨论了这种方法的潜力和局限性。所有信息都是作为可扩展的Wikidata项目的一部分公开提供的,我们邀请研究人员,从业者和其他对城市生态学感兴趣的人提供额外的假设,以及注释和添加到现有的。假设网络和维基数据项目构成了城市生态学知识库的第一步,可以扩展和策划,使从业者和研究人员都受益。